Ron Rash's 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' disappoints

Bill Hogan, Chicago Tribune

Bill Hogan, Chicago Tribune

Troy Jollimore

The stories in Ron Rash's new collection, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” are set in the American South, and the American South Rash envisions is a haunted, hazardous place. The characters in these stories drown, freeze to death, lose limbs in battle, are mutilated by breaking glass. (The fortunate ones die in their sleep, only to have their corpses discovered by burglars.)

They lose their children to war, they see their barns burned down, they get hooked on meth, they have their hands amputated to settle a dispute. They shoot each other, they rob each other, they try to run off with one another's wives, they burn one another's tongues with hot fireplace pokers. They suffer and die as a result of their own stupidity, the stupidity of their companions, or, in some cases, sheer dumb bad luck. That's to say, a lot of the characters in these stories meet bad ends. But then, a lot of them had bad beginnings too, and most of their middles aren't so great either.

This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.

"'It just seems everyone around here always expects the worst,'" one character complains to her mother. Of course she is right; but in such a universe who would expect anything but the worst? In what is perhaps the most optimistic story, "Cherokee," a gambling couple avoids ruin precisely by embracing pessimism: At the end of the story, when Lisa walks toward her husband — who has managed, miraculously, not to lose all of their money — she sees him as "a man who knows as well as she does that their luck couldn't last." That pretty much sums it up: There are two kinds of luck in the world of these stories, the kind that's bad and the kind that doesn't last.

There is, then, a certain consistency of vision in these stories. After a while, though, it's a hard vision to take. Perhaps it would be easier if the reader sensed that Rash had some compassion for his characters or had any interest whatever in individuals who are smart, competent or morally admirable, or who actually succeed at something, however small. But the possible existence of such persons is barely acknowledged in this set of stories, which take place in a world in which the only distinguishing character traits are negative ones — stupidity, ignorance, lack of compassion, arrogance, dishonesty, prejudice, vindictiveness, greed.

One unfortunate consequence of this is that after a while, the stories become gratingly predictable. Consider "The Magic Bus," which concerns Sabra, a young woman growing up on an Appalachian farm in the '60s who feels that she is missing out on the excitement and ferment of that era. When a pair of San Francisco hippies show up in a flamboyantly decorated bus, she is intrigued and entranced — and so might the reader have been, except that by this point in the book even the most inattentive reader will be able to foresee that no good will come of this encounter, that by the end of the story the hippies will have committed some act that will belie their claims to believe in peace, freedom and universal brotherhood. Rash is much too much the cynic about human nature to allow that someone might actually value freedom or peace in a way that would improve their treatment of other human beings, rather than leading them to engage in their own forms of oppression and violence. In isolation, "The Magic Bus" might have been an interesting story. But to place it in the midst of a dozen other stories, nearly all of which express the same bleak, dismayed and fundamentally frightened viewpoint, makes it very difficult for a reader to have any reaction other than "here we go again."

That said, a couple of these stories do stand out from the rest. "The Trusty," like many of these pieces, is the tale of a despicable man, but the writing works a bit harder here and there is some lovely imagery. (Also, its position as the book's opener helps: Readers will not yet have tired of Rash's misanthropy.) But far and away the best story here is one of the few in which there are no loathsome or pathetic characters. (It does, it should be said, feature an accidental death.) "Something Rich and Strange" is unique in other ways, too: Its eschewal of dialogue and its surreal imagery lend it a feel that is part prose poem, part myth, part recollected dream. The story is so surprising that to reveal anything about it might risk the reader's pleasure, so I will say only this: It is very hard to think of another story to compare it to, but the first one that came to my mind, Alistair MacLeod's "As Birds Bring Forth the Sun," is a masterpiece. It is too early to say whether Rash's story is a masterpiece, but at this moment it seems to me a genuine contender.

Writing about the violent and the corrupt is a long-standing tradition in Southern literature. But unless one possesses the writing chops of a William Faulkner or a Flannery O'Connor, an excessively obsessive focus on the dark side of existence can soon turn into a literary dead end. Still, I am always one to insist that a writer should be judged not by the preponderance of what he publishes, but by his best work. "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is, on the whole, a disappointing book, but "Something Rich and Strange" is a stunning, beautiful achievement. I know a lot of writers who would willingly submit to writing 999 bad stories if they could be guaranteed that story No. 1,000 would be that good.